One February day in 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson was contemplating Sargent Shriver's testicles, in a policy-making context. Pressing the director of the Peace Corps into taking the reins as the head of the War on Poverty, Johnson suggested, “you've got the responsibility, you've got the authority, you've got the power, you've got the money. Now you may not have the glands.” The locker-room manipulation worked a charm, and Shriver did not wait a second to clarify: “I got plenty of glands” (119). With these words, referring to his own groin, the leader of the Peace Corps's mission of modernization abroad became the figurehead for the War on Poverty at home.

Molly Geidel's recent book about the place of the Peace Corps within the American modernization mission in the 1960s offers many such pearls that highlight links between masculinity concerns and policymaking at home and abroad. Geidel's rigorous and diverse study is marked by the depth of the author's analysis and synthesis of a range of relevant sources from within and around the 1960s Peace Corps (including documents from presidential libraries, magazine publications, oral-history interviews and more), allowing her to intervene in a number of fields, including modernization, gender and international relations, racial fantasies, and the politics of birth control.

Geidel argues that American policymakers established and used the Peace Corps to overcome the effeminizing dangers that suburban life represented to traditional models of heroic frontier masculinity. By constructing the Peace Corps as the maverick alternative to the company man, Geidel (who pays particularly deft attention to the Peace Corps's promotional materials) demonstrates how Shriver and his partners effectively established a prestigious gentlemen's club, with a built-in air of worldliness and sense of mission, if little substantive achievement. Central to Geidel's treatment is the notion that the Peace Corps became a key channel through which modernization theorists such as Walt W. Rostow and liberal cold warriors such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. sought to resolve their anxieties regarding their country's virility and dominance. In other words, while the Peace Corps represented a concentrated American effort to modernize the world's underdeveloped poor, in effect it served to furnish middle-class white men with “intimate yet hierarchical masculine fantasy spaces of development” (xv).

The book is divided into six roughly chrological chapters spanning the 1960s. The first three chapters focus on the place of the Peace Corps within the 1960s mission of modernization and developmentalism abroad, the way the organization appealed to contemporary beatnik and antiestablishment leanings while in fact coopting any inkling of dissent, and the fascinating experiences of female volunteers in a bureaucracy so bent on homosocial intimacy between men. Particularly striking is Geidel's analysis of the way Peace Corps executives modelled the perfect female volunteer, as one who “manages to stay attractive and feminine under the most trying of circumstances” (75). Rather than merely calling out the misogyny for what it is, Geidel engages memoirs and interviews to show that the women of the Peace Corps have come to both resent and adopt confusing frames of reference that taught them to simultaneously crave the escape from suburbia and embrace dependent roles in professional and romantic relationships with the Peace Corps's men.

The latter half of the book is more diverse in content. Chapter 4 focusses on the aforementioned attempt at converting Peace Corps efforts (which administrators saw as a success) to domestic rehabilitation of nonwhite populations within the War on Poverty. Chapter 5 examines the sophisticated way the Peace Corps dealt with anti-war sentiments among its volunteers, by coopting their subversion and using it as testimony to the openness and diversity of opinion in American society. The sixth and final chapter shifts the lens almost entirely from American actors to foreign reactors, looking at the ways Bolivians in 1969 expelled the Peace Corps, following the agency's efforts at furthering birth control in the country. Geidel's multilingual research of the role a Bolivian fiction film (Jorge Sanjines's Blood of the Condor) played in the transnational politics of Peace Corps intervention is particularly interesting.

One of the book's major accomplishments is that it showcases the inseparability between the domestic arena and the foreign one: fantasies of masculinity and femininity, racial difference and hierarchy, and modernization theory gospel all prospered in the 1960s Peace Corps. Similar notions were then brought back home, defining not only establishment practice, but (most importantly) the resistance to it as well. In this sense, Geidel's attention to the way both Black Panthers and SDS activists eagerly adopted the obsession with masculine leadership is compelling. At the same time, it is not entirely clear whether it was the broader modernization discourse (which Geidel rightfully depicts as dominant across many avenues of 1960s America) or the actual Peace Corps that rubbed off into radical circles at home. Shriver's dominance in both the Peace Corps and the War on Poverty suggests that the Johnson administration aimed to adapt the Peace Corps mission to domestic campaigns, but more detail could have been used to flesh out these connections.

While the current treatment interestingly mentions particular instances in which men volunteered to the Peace Corps to avoid conscription (83, 116, 160), some more sustained consideration of recent works about national service in this twilight era for the citizen–soldier model might have helped situate the Peace Corps as an organization which sustained simultaneously both a pro- and an antiestablishment image.Footnote ¹ A more minor point is that the title of the book seems a bit misleading: while the book certainly considers foreign attitudes to American intervention, its analytical focus is less on the creation of a global system or consciousness, and more on the way the Peace Corps was a product of, and in turn shaped, white masculine middle-class values in the 1960s US. On a related note, the author does not fully explain her rationale for the book's periodization: Geidel convinces that the 1960s were the iconic period for the Peace Corps, yet one wonders whether exploring the organization's image and conduct through the impending malaise of the 1970s could point to fractures and changes, rather than the continuity at the heart of Geidel's argument. At the same time, such a comment, which essentially asks to learn more of this history in the years that followed, is itself a testimony to the engaging and thoughtful nature of this book.

In conclusion, this is a provocative and versatile study of the underbelly of one of the most iconic emblems of American benevolence in the twentieth century, and it should interest and inform the work of scholars of mission, masculinity, and development in the 1960s US.